Charris Ford (aka the Granola Ayatollah of Canola)
My passion for all things Eco started when I was 18 in the hills of Tennessee, where I spent ten years running the family’s Organic farm, living with solar power home, harvesting rainwater, chopping wood and hauling spring water. I have lived off-grid for nearly 20 years.
I was a student of Permaculture and apprenticed with members of a nearby Amish community. The Amish taught me how to work my team of Belgian horses and they reinforced my love for doing things by hand. My fondest memories of Tennessee are of driving the horse drawn wagon, mowing with a scythe and foraging for wild food & alternative medicine.
Though living close to the land and striving to live in greater harmony with nature has always been my favorite kind of activism, I realized that dwindling resources, exploding populations and global warming would not resolve themselves, nor would they be remedied by a handful of dedicated back to the land-ers. Significant cultural evolution requires extensive mainstream education in terms of career education. As a matter of fact we have to avail the educational resources in a proper way to get education degree and I have since made awareness-raising the focus of my environmental work.